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The Unquiet Dead
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<img src="http://www.barrowdowns.com/images/posticons/redeye.jpg" align=absmiddle> Re: Who knows their trolls?
Saulotus:
Now this is just going in circles and I'm tempted to drop it. But for clarity's sake, I’ll try to tie down a few more ends. Pippin killed a "hill-troll." We’ve already flogged this horse. Could've been an Olog-hai but the text doesn't say so. I'm asking if anybody knows of a place where the text uses the word. I thought that that request was straightforward.
I take your nominalist point about torog and Sindarin, but I don’t really think it clinches the point. If the word torog never appeared at all, it would not diminish the (mere) existence of trolls. Their collective existence is well established by the story. Torog, however, does not significantly adjust our understanding of trolls. It is just one of those details, like the analogous yrch, which lend complexity to the story and thereby lend it mimetic credibility. If you subtracted the back-story word, torog, from the story, troll would still carry the essential nominative load.
Sindarin is a little trickier. I’ll take your word that the designation doesn’t appear in the story. As I recall, it is just referred to as "Elvish." In the following rhetorical flourish, however, I think that you overplay your case.
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Quote:<hr> Or how 'bout this one; Sindarin. The Sindar didn't speak Sindarin 'cause it ain't mentioned in the text. Only the Appendix, so we can say that they must have spoken Westron or sumpin cause if Tolkien really wanted us to know it was Sindarin they spoke, he woulda wrote Sindarin in the text.<hr></blockquote>
Sindarin is spoken in the story on many occasions: by elves, by hobbits, by men, etc. Concrete examples exist quite literally. So it can’t be Westron. Also the notion of the thing, Sindarin, is pretty clearly given us. But I would concur. The story is not hurt if, indeed, "Elvish" is the only designation given to Sindarin in the story. Sindarin takes on it’s much profounder significance in Silma., and other works where the sundering of the Elves is spelled out much more completely than in LotR.
In either case, torog or Sindarin, the role of the words is essentially nominative, not distinctive. (As JRRT stated in his essay on languages in the Appendices, Sindarin is the relevant spoken language in LotR, the other Elvish tongues – though extant – didn’t figure in this history.) This makes the cases of torog and Sindarin substantially different than the case of Olog-hai. The existence of trolls and of an Elvish language is firmly established. The fact that synonyms exist to describe them is merely a matter of texture. But any terminological variance doesn’t undercut the mere existence of the things. In the case of the Olog-hai, I would argue that uncertainty is more undermining. Their very existence -- as discrete things -- is never established with any of the same kind of concrete examples -- in the story -- which are given to prove the existence of spoken Elvish or of trolls.
That’s my whole point. In the story, itself, I can think of clear-cut examples of Elvish speech and I can think of clear-cut examples of trolls. I cannot, however, think of one clear-cut example of Olog-hai in the story. This is not to say they do not or cannot exist, only that their existence is not made concrete to the reader in the way that the identity of Uruk-hai is carefully distinguished from that of garden-variety orcs.
g.
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